Bees are fatherless: the queen and the worker bees form their state, intent on collecting, a great matriarchy. – Lukas lives alone with his mother in the forest. He does not know his father; the child may have a talent for long jumping, but his jumps get him nowhere: his mother answers all his questions about the unknown father with resolute silence – the unknown father who has long begun to show in Lukas himself – a violence-prone child being brought up by nature, according to his mother’s plan. This child, suspended in phantom pain, has to fight back, and thus, “nature” takes its course:
Ashes billow as Lukas jumps into them. There has been a terrible fire; the huge crime scene lies white and devastated – much-hated nature has been targeted. There had been fourteen bee-hives at the forest’s edge; now, thanks to an unknown perpetrator, there are only smouldering stumps, and they bring Peter to the scene, a conscientious inspector, whom Lukas considers a possible father – perhaps that was the secret plan? An investigator – possibly connected to the mother? – investigating his own issues?When Wim, the wandering beekeeper, “another one of those fathers” and an ex-con, appears as well, the great searching movement, universally longed for, begins. Everybody is a suspect: possible perpetrators, collecting and talking. From their traces, reaching far back, and the conclusions they draw, a trembling picture arises, answered by the bees – which buzz around them.

Händl KlausHändl Klaus (born in 1969 in Rum/Tyrol) lives in Vienna, Berlin and Port on Lake Biel (Switzerland). After completing acting studies in Vienna, he became an ensemble member at the Schauspielhaus there, besides appearing in several films. His radio play Kleine Vogelkunde (ORF) won the award Radio Play of the Year in 1996. For his volume of short stories, (Legenden), he won the Rauris Literature Prize and the Robert Walser Prize. At the 2008 Film Festival in Locarno, his film März won the Leopard for Best Debut Film. In 2004, (Wilde) Mann mit traurigen Augen won the Book Prize of the German-Language Literary Commission of the Canton Bern, which went again in 2006 to his Dunkel lockende Welt. In 2004, Theater heute voted him Best Young Author, and in 2006 Playwright of the Year. In 2007 he received the Great Literary Award of the State of Tyrol, the Stipend of the Schiller Memorial Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg as well as the Welti Dramatist’s Prize of the City of Bern.

Musicbanda Franui
For the piece Meine Bienen. Eine Schneise (My Bees. A Swath) by Händl Klaus, Franui’s unique battery of sound (the special mix of winds and brass and various strings) is combined for the first time with a boy soprano. The musical occurrences in the beehive – from the bright song of the queen bee to the metallic sound of the clappers that the beekeeper occasionally uses when catching a swarm of bees – serve as the basis for inventing a musical world in which the familiar is obscured and the far-away magnified.